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Google Flips Back to Groups Beta (Again)
afabbro writes "Google backed off its beta of Google Groups within 24 hours of making it mandatory for all users. You may recall that its lack of features (date searches), unwanted features (e-mail masking), and clunky user interface met with a very chilly reception here. Unfortunately, as of December 5th, Google Groups Beta is back and you can't get to the original (wonderful) Google Groups anymore. Be sure to share your opinion with Google."
That of all the tech companies plying their wares on the web, Google is one of the few that actively listens to complaints and at least in some measure, acts on them.
The new interface is horrible. Is there any technical reason why Google can't provide a 'Classic' view? Is the underlying data going to be that different? It's going to have to show the old, archived data still, which it obviously can with both the old and new systems. So why not continue to offer it?
Failing that, is there another way to look search/view the old Usenet archive?
I wonder - am I alone in seeing the "Google Groups 2" as a significant improvement on the original?
I like the improved 'posting' speed; I love the 'starred topics' (Though I remain sceptical that the 'new posts' feature works properly - I keep thinking "new since when?"). I like the idea that a thread has become the notional unit searched in the new UI - Google Groups 2 far better suits my needs.
Can some please translate the summary to English for me? I can't understand a thing from the summary. The summary says "Google backed off its beta of Google Groups" but "you can't get to the original (wonderful) Google Groups anymore". What the hell is there then? Two monkeys and a flying squirell? Plus, when I go to groups.google.com I see the original Google Groups - contradicting the summary. What am I missing here?
Well I am using it as a mailing list and it works well and better than yahoogroups lately though most of yahoo's problems with some ISPs have been resolved.
However does the Moderation work yet?
I tried to setup an announcement list where the members can make announcements which would be moderated. I attempted to send message that required moderation and was able to moderate the message. No email no mention of the queued messages on the site. Nothing. As such we are still using yahoogroups for that list.
I have nothing against their not displaying email addresses.
However, I should still be able to search for them. Very often I want to search for a post written by someone with a very common name, and do so because his/her email address is unique and not even near being common.
They should allow us to search for the email address and return the all the results, even if not displaying the actual addresses.
Beetle B.
I've found that Google sometimes changes the content by region and by how old your cookie is. They have a timestamp and a signature inside of the cookie (to verify that it is generated by them), among some other things.
In my experience, users with older (>24hr) cookies see these kind of changes, while the rest have to wait for their cookie to age a bit.
Maybe this will clear up the nonstop "I see it, I don't" posts about Google sites.
Does anyone else remember the outcry when Google took over from Dejanews?
At that time, many people were furious that a refined, functional interface had been replaced with a clunky, limited one. They were also furious that all those old dejanews.com links had just been trashed forever.
And the same thing happened during Dejanews' reign as the Keeper of the Archive. Any time the interface changed (IIRC, there were three major overhauls over the life of the site), fans of the old would mercilessly trash the new.
Plus ça change...
I really wish they hadn't. It would be nice at least to have a second source. Of course they would have had to eventually limit searches on binary groups they offered, but it was a sad day when they dropped it altogether.
Altavista advanced search capabilities always seemed far more advanced than Google, even now. For example, how, again, in google can I search for an article where a specific word is near another specific word (within n words), to avoid all the false matches of composite content? Google seems to spend most of its efforts determining where 80% would like to go relative to a particular topic rather than any degree of accuracy.
It's just typical reactionary UI response. People see something that doesn't do what they expect in exactly the way they expect it, and they cry foul before looking into the advantages.
;-)
Things I see that are good:
1. More user-centric (highlighting names, etc.) rather than message centric.
2. The GMail style expando-headers makes for faster drilling down.
3. Much faster page loading (might just be new hardware).
The down-sides:
1. I think the tree mode is the more usable, and yet you have to click to get to it. Suggestion: make it the default (and add it to GMail).
2. Put the "original" link on the page by default, don't require 2 clicks to get to it.
3. It's still Usenet
What's more: if you really don't like google groups, just stop using it. For pete's sake, you can just use trn or Mozilla or any of a dozen other clients to feed off your ISP. Google has no obligation to provide your favorite UI features to Usenet.
I use Google Groups all the time - never did search by date so I don't care about that. I like the new UI.
:-)
I used to go to a lot of trouble handling NNTP feeds; since Google Groups was released I don't bother.
A little bit OT: Is it just me, or are some things getting simpler? GMail and Google Groups cuts down my 'overhead time'. The switch from Linux (well, sometimes Windows 2000) to Mac OS X saves me a lot of admin hours each month. The quality and productivity of coding tools (e.g., IntelliJ and LispWorks) is going through the roof: everything seems to be getting easier
As the poster said, it can be useful to contact people directly, in particular when a thread is outdated and it may be unlikely the original author would see your followup. I have had people contact me about posts I made over 10 years ago.
However, I have contacted google and told them they have violated the DMCA by engaging in unauthorized modifications to my copyrighted usenet postings. At no time did I give any right to google, or anyone else, to modify my postings of the past 14 years in any way. It is my right, not googles, to include my email address in my postings.
To those who say 'but it will stop spam'. If you don't want to risk spam from usenet postings, use a fake or otherwise hidden email address.
I would further add that acceptance of this sets a horrible precedent. What will be next? Filterning of certain news groups that might be deemed 'inappropriate' by some political groups? Editing or exclusion of posts based on keywords?
Its a slippery slope and while this change might seem minor it goes completely against what usenet is about.
I really don't like it when the text for a link doesn't match the target. If you see
e ct ronics.sonystyle.com/m..."
"http://sonyelectronics.sonystyle.com/m..."
and then notice that its really
"http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http://sonyel
it makes you wonder what use they have planned for those click histories ( tied into those cookies ).
Actually, I tried that and it doesn't work very effectively.
Some examples:
I know someone who's had a number of addresses over the years, however, all the addresses had the same userid (say jkdoe@...). He frequently looks for old posts he's written, and so all he did was search for "jkdoe" and he'd get all his posts from all his addresses.
Now that doesn't work, even if he types that in the Author search field.
In fact, I compared with the old Google Groups (at UK) and even used a specific email address in the Author field. Or in the search field. I tried a whole bunch of permutations - the old Google Groups always gave more results.
Heck - I just tried inputting his full name in both - forget the address search. 191 using Beta, 271 using the old Google groups. For whatever reason, the Beta search is not getting all the results it should.
Beetle B.
I sure wish I could use Google Groups to post using an alternate email address. The interface forces me to use my primary gmail account. As far as I can tell, the only way around this is to create a second Google account, which forces me to log out of gmail...hassle.
If they want to limit me to threads, then I want to be able to add the number of replies and authors per thread to my search.
Eliminating threads that have 1 message/0 replies would make finding things MUCH faster. Right now I find tons of threads that are people asking the same question, and not very many where someone provided an answer.
Didn't some student not too long ago research what made a "good newsgroup"? They should put his research into the search parameters somewhow.
Back in the mid to late 90's I was using the Usenet groups a lot to ask about and research programming questions. I found it was a great source of information and it was an invaluable tool for me at work. The last few years I've noticed a trend where find almost everything I'm looking for programming-wise under a normal Google search before I find it in the groups (if I can find it all in the groups). I could be completely wrong about this but it appears from my perspective that Usenet is going the way of BBSes in light of all the specialized message boards with Google indexed content on the web. Maybe Google is just helping put the final nail in the coffin for a dying Usenet instead of actively killing the newsgroups.
is the lack of seeing "sub-groups" within a group, ie, when i research C# stuff for mono, I look in
microsoft.public.dotnet
and in that group, at the top, each subgroup within that group was listed; now, most of the time, when new groups were added, i would see the newer groups there, etc. Also, it was great for navigating through the group "tree". Usually, in a large group with a lot of subgroups, i link to the main group trunk, and then go from there when i am looking for something. From this standpoint, this isnt one step back in usability, its three steps back. I hope this isnt a sign of things to come from google, because quite honestly, its pretty lazy in terms of design and testing. Its like removing the "Refresh" button from firefox when that feature has already become a staple of web browser interfaces.
/rant